Oracle9i Application Server Online Documentation Help

Finding Information in Other Ways

In addition to searching, there are three ways to find specific information within the documentation library:

Looking Up Definitions in the Master Glossary
Looking Up Index Terms in the Master Index
Looking Up Error Messages

Looking Up Definitions in the Master Glossary

The Master Glossary, located on the Getting Started tab, contains short definitions of specialized database and Oracle terms. Selecting a term opens a small window that shows the definition from the glossary of a particular book. If more than one book defines the term in its glossary, you can choose the book that is most relevant for your purposes.

The glossary typically does not define terms that are keywords or special names, such as the names of buttons or dialogs.

Looking Up Index Terms in the Master Index

To find the most relevant topics for a given term, you can use the Master Index located on the home page. It is a compilation of the indexes for all the books. It is useful if you are not sure of a term's exact spelling, or if a full-text search returns too many results.

Because the Master Index contains a very large number of entries, the following might happen:

You might find duplicate entries from many books. When the same entry occurs multiple times, the Master Index lists "entry #2", "entry #3", and so on. The same applies if a second-level entry is listed multiple times, indicated by "subentry #2" and so on.

You might need to check multiple variations of spelling or punctuation. For example, there might be several entries under the singular form of a word, and several more under the plural form. A term might be indexed both with and without a hyphen, or as both one and two words (such as "single sign-on" and "single signon"). The large number of entries means you might have to scroll to see both variations.

Looking Up Error Messages

If you receive an error message, you can look up the corresponding cause and recommended action using the Error Messages search form on the Getting Started tab.

The search form comes with the common message prefix ORA- already filled in. You can just supply the number, or overwrite it with a different message prefix. Because messages are sometimes listed inconsistently, such as ORA-01234 and ORA-1234, a search that does not use a leading zero also matches messages that have the leading zero.

When you perform a search, the matching messages are displayed along with an error message search field. When you follow the link to the message information, that page that contains the information is loaded into the browser window.

The cause and recovery information in the published manual is brief. To see whether there are bugs filed or tutorials written for particular error messages, you can use online Oracle services such as Oracle MetaLink.